So It’s now been over 2 years since I started work on 42, and she’s built up a huge userbase.

That said I’m finally feeling comfortable enough with how she is written and how she works, so I have started a Patreon campaign!

Don’t worry, no existing features are being paywalled off, but supporters do get a couple of nifty new features~

Anyway, this all comes with another hefty update to 42, so do let me know if you find anything wrong.

IRL Updates.

I’m approaching the end of my final year of university and am being bogged down with large amounts of coursework and exam revision. Having 42 finally be finished is a massive weight off my shoulders, so now I can concentrate full force on my coursework to pass the year! Hopefully by this time next year, I will be travelling Europe, probably in a tent, so It’s going to be a fun year ahead of me.

Welp. The day draws near. The day we say goodbye to the 42 that we’ve known and (mostly) loved for the last 18 months. The day I introduce fully her newer version, 42 Version 5 (or 5.1 depending on how semantically specific you want to be I guess.)

TL;DR: There will be a 3-6 hour downtime at 11AM BST 30/09

The Changes

There is a huge laundry list of changes that will be made to 42 in this update, but the most notable one involves granting 42 the ability to run on multiple shards, which means no more shard limit, and by extension, no more need to prune the bots servers. This also means that there will be no more minimum member limits on inviting the bot, so you can have your small testing and private servers back again.

So as a few people may know, on the 16th I went to university. I am going into my third year of a computer science degree, which means I have to create a big project that they will mark me on. I’ll continue talking about this near the end of this post, but right now the thing that everyone is here for.

42 is nearing her major update

For those of you who don’t know already, for the last 15 months, I have been refractoring, rewriting, updating, adding to and generally improving 42’s codebase. And for the past about 9 months, these updates have been available for public use under my second bot Beta 42. I’ve been wanting to make this update for just as long, but there was one key thing stopping me, namely, Discord’s “shard” limit. The tl;dr of this is that a bot can only exist on 2500 servers before the developer needs to make some changes.

So a while ago, the main Discord library utilised by my bots was given a major update to how it was structured. To most people that doesn’t mean much, but to me, it means I needed to re-write my bots before the Discord developers do something to break the current branch that they use. With that said, users of Beta 42 may have noticed a significant drop in perceived productivity towards that versions code and feature set. That was because I have been updating her to rewrite branch instead.

Hi. I’m Sam Rockett, or as you may know me, and how I prefer to refer to myself, squaswin. I am a university student learning computer science and am about to go into my last year, but enough about me.

For the last almost 2 years now, I have been learning Python, and creating a bot for Discord called 42, who in that time has managed to propergate to over 3,000 servers and affect the online experience of nearly 200,000 different people, entirely by word of mouth. Today, I decided to finally create a real website for her, and in my endeavours, I thought “why not create a blog and portfolio too?”

Currently, 42 is in private mode because of the 2500 server shard limit, but her future version Beta 42 is available to join your server if you want her.

So here I am. My first blog, my first real website. I’m going to try my best to keep everyone up to date on what is going on with the bot and what is going on with myself too, though in the immediate future, watch out for: